pirate bay

The Pirate Bay, the internet's favorite torrent search engine, is back online right now, roughly seven weeks after being raided by law enforcement in home country Sweden. While the website and its founders have long been targeted by authorities for violations of piracy laws, this was the longest period the site was offline, and it was definitely in question if it would ever return. As the ultimate symbol of its rise from the ashes once more, the site's pirate ship logo is currently replaced by a phoenix.

It's a familiar story: The Pirate Bay goes down, and then it comes back around some time later. Recently The Pirate Bay was taken down after a raid by police in Stockholm. The police seized hardware, including servers, and the result has been a long low lament across the Internet as the site remains offline. Of course, TPB's archives have long been available, and now Isohunt has made them easily accessible via the new "Old Pirate Bay".

It's happened - The Pirate Bay is down today. Stockholm County Police Intellectual Property Crime National Coordinator Paul Pintér released a statement today about a "crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm." Pintér went on to say that "this is in connection with violations of copyright law." The crackdown coincided with the first loss of signal in several months for piracy and filesharing website The Pirate Bay. This site is down with its forum site, Suprbay.org as well as Bayimg and Pastebay. Several other torrent-friendly sites like Torrage, Istole tracker, EXTV, and Zoink are also down.

A court in the Netherlands has tossed out a cases against a Dutch man who uploaded more than 5,000 ebooks to The Pirate Bay, saying the matter isn't criminal and should be dealt with in civil court. This is the latest blow to the anti-piracy group BREIN, which isn't happy with the ruling.

Back in September, we reported that one of The Pirate Bay's founders, Gottrid Svartholm Warg, had been sent to Sweden by Cambodia, where he was arrested at his apartment. The issue resulted from a sentence in 2009, which was appealed and reduced to a few months and a multi-million fine. Today he received a jail sentence for a separate hacking case.

The Pirate Bay has been hit with yet another blow after an Irish court has ordered six internet service providers in the country to block access to The Pirate Bay. The court order was sparked by complaints from four music labels that the file-sharing website was hosting copyrighted content.

We all find ourselves from time to time wondering if a particular corner of the Internet we were hoping to access is really down, or if it is just something on our side. Such is the case of Pirate Bay users the world over who can rest assured: it's not just you. For whatever reason, The Pirate Bay is down from one side of the world to the other, and no one is sure why.

In case you missed it, yesterday the Department of Defense went after the much-publicized "The Liberator" 3D-printed gun, which has been successfully tested and can be created entirely (with the exception of the firing pin) with ABS plastic and a 3D printer. According to the US Department of Defense Trade Controls, the company responsible for the gun - Defense Distributed - could have violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulation by distributing the CAD file without authorization under the Arms Export Control Act. As a result, the file was pulled the same day it went live, but not after having been downloaded over 100,000 times. Now it has reached torrent websites, and there's no taking it back.

The Pirate Bay has been the brunt of most legal battles dealing with piracy over the last few years, but apparently that isn't stopping the website from remaining incredibly popular. The torrent tracker has surpassed 4shared, Mediafire, and other popular file-sharing websites to become the world's largest once again.

The website and ecosystem known as The Pirate Bay are known for their involvement in the uploads and downloads of countless files across the internet and the legal ramifications of their involvement with said files - and this week they've moved to North Korea. Or so they say they did this month. In fact what they've done is to - so they say - set up a ruse to capture the attention of the public so that they public can become more aware of the fact that anyone can tell them a lie.